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The ETC system stalls at the (toll) gate: electronic toll systems are inching forward at a snail''s pace in Japan.

Article Excerpt
WHEN INTERNET RESEARCHERS Japan.Internet.Com and Info Plant asked 300 drivers in June if they knew what the ETC (Electric Toll Collection) system does, 95 percent of them answered that they recognize the name. Yet only a paltry 3 actually use the system itself.

"I wonder what the system is for," wrote 21-year-old Yasue Takeda on the Yomiuri Shimbun's readers' forum. Takeda had just survived Golden Week traffic tie-ups on the Tohoku Expressway and was unimpressed. "As far as I could see, the ETC-only tollgates were not only rarely used--they were even exacerbating the congestion at the regular gates."

Now a common sight on Japan's highway tollgates, the ETC system was introduced by the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport in March 2001. The system was supposed to ease traffic jams on the nation's major expressways, allowing vehicles equipped with a transponder to pass through the gates without having to stop to pay.

The system requires the driver to have an ETC-compatible credit card for insertion into a transponder slot. As the vehicle passes through the tollgates, the fare is recorded on both the expressway computer system and the IC card in the transponder via the technologies of wireless telecommunications.

Thirty percent of highway congestion occurs at tollgates, according to the Japan Public Expressway Corporation (JPEC), operators of expressways nationwide. Instead of expanding roads, accelerating the speed at which traffic...

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